closed as not a real question by Mark Trapp Sep 28 '11 at 17:22

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4

Rails generates PHP code? Really? I wouldn't know, I'm not even a Ruby guy, much less a Rails guy, but it seems completely pointless and way too complicated (both to do and to get right).
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delnanSep 28 '11 at 15:46

Perl influenced both PHP and Ruby, other than that, I don't see the two being related outside of similar problem domains.
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World Engineer♦Sep 28 '11 at 16:55

2

I sympathize with your plight there, but this seems like a question that could've been answered with just a little bit of research. This feels off-topic to me for this site.
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Anna Lear♦Sep 28 '11 at 16:58

6

I'm sorry, but really? The Wikipedia article in particular seems to be fairly comprehensive and proves that Ruby is its own language.
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Anna Lear♦Sep 28 '11 at 17:00

1

@AnnaLear: I get that it's a softball question, but it isn't that hard for us to answer with a yes or no including a link for more info. At least some thoughtful responders got in before the question was slapped down.
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Steve EversSep 28 '11 at 17:33

I understand that the Rails framework can be used to generate PHP code

That's not generally true. I suppose somebody somewhere may have made this happen, but their mental health problems would not be insignificant.

In general, Rails applications are written in a mixture of languages underpinned by Ruby, the others including HTML, CSS, Javascript. While HTML may be replaced by, for example, HAML, and Javascript (recently) by Coffeescript, with compilation steps occurring as needed, I've never seen Ruby being "compiled" down to PHP.

Ruby and PHP both appeared at about the same time, according to Wikipedia (here and here). Ruby was a fairly general-purpose scripting language that erupted into the Web World with the advent of Rails in 2004, whereas AFAIK, PHP was designed for web development.